


Mirror

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Dysphoria, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I Don't Even Know, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, Non-Chronological, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Reflection, The Author Regrets Nothing, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21580324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: Gakushuu was the complete opposite of everything Gakuhou had ever wanted.(The boy in the picture on his father's desk is real, but the version Gakushuu Asano created in his head is not. Ikeda's there, anyways, in his reflection.)Gakushuu is haunted by the ghost of Ikeda he made up in his mind. He's been there since Gakushuu was five.
Relationships: Gakushuu Asano & Rikuto Ikeda
Comments: 39
Kudos: 207





	Mirror

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! It's me again, back on my bullshit. I've been in an antsy mood recently so I decided to finish up one of the stories I've been sitting a while on. Presenting: Mirror.
> 
> Trigger Warnings (Please Read if you're concerned, no spoilers)  
> Gakushuu Asano is haunted by the ghost of Ikeda he's made up in his head. Ikeda's not real, so there are some elements of visual/auditory hallucinations and identity dysphoria. Trippy stuff. The real Ikeda is dead, so there are references to his suicide as per canon. 
> 
> It's not that bad, I promise! I do apologize in advance, however. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!

**Mirror**

Gakushuu had met Ikeda Rikuto in a dream once. Ikeda had sat across him with tears in his eyes and asked Gakushuu why he became the reason he killed himself.

Gakushuu didn't know how to answer him then, the two of them seated in the middle of a endless vastness of white nothing. He watches Ikeda sob and ask again for hours and hours and wakes up on his bed, in his room, and he still doesn't know the answer.

He had been 13 then, fresh in the first year of high school and high on the top of the food chain with the A class, still drugged up on his father's honeyed words about elitism and academic prowess. One of the 2-A students had been in the midst of detailing an intriguing mathematics question when his classmate walks by, a 2-E student with unfortunate timing, and Gakushuu had watched as he was mercilessly mocked for his grades or lack thereof. He hadn't joined in, but he hadn't spoken out against it either, but the pained embarrassed expression on the 2-E student's face is the one Ikeda wears on his.

"How is that my problem?" Gakushuu had snapped, hurt. He thinks of his father, the man who imparted all these principles to him. "He's your teacher."

Ikeda frowns at him, sickening sympathy on his face. "You should know right from wrong. You're so young."

Gakushuu isn't too young to understand about the concept of bullying. He doesn't see anything about it first, because it's the way it's supposed to be, always has been in his perception, the survival of the fittest. 

He doesn't quite understand anything else.

He wakes up to red eyes and a damp pillowcase, in his room like he always does.

He doesn't see anything about it at first, (he doesn't quite understand anything else,) but much later when he's 14 and he's pulling off a larger student off a small kid he's smacked black and blue and the kid flinches away from Gakushuu like he expects the beating to continue, Gakushuu thinks he sees it. It's not so much the fact he just saved the kid's life - it's his badge, his name, his class-A status. Gakushuu pulls the kid to his feet and watches him scamper away with an awkwardly bent leg.

He was a small kid, aged 9, and his father had taught him to wrap his knuckles during practice and angle them well to drive bone into flesh. He remembers the others who weren't quite so lucky, quite as prepared as he was; even the children slightly bigger than him. They were 9, after all, and there were those aged 10 and 11 and 12. They learn to leave Gakushuu alone quickly after he leaves on a jaw a bruise the size of a tennis ball.

Scraped the hell out of his knuckles, too. Gakushuu hadn't told his father about it, because he'd have gotten a reprimand about not wrapping them in stray cloth. He learns that preparation is important.

He doesn't hear about Ikeda from Gakuhou. He hears about him from Tamiko, his housekeeper, who had sat him on her lap and stroked his hair as waited for him to stop sniffling. She doesn't go into details, but tells Gakushuu again and again that his father loves him and doesn't want to lose him. When he's 8, all Gakushuu wants to do is tell Daddy that he's not going to go anywhere without him. He wishes he could be better for him, he tells Tamiko through his tears, and she kisses him on the forehead and tells him not to cry.

Gakushuu met Ikeda once when he was 3, but he doesn't remember it. There's a photograph of Gakushuu on Ikeda's lap somewhere in the archives of family photographs nobody looks through anymore, but Gakushuu remember seeing it when he was 10, wading knee deep in boxes in the attic.

He keeps the picture. It's not something his father misses, if he did, he'd never brought it up. 

When he was 7, he first steps into the new building that he will soon know as Kunugigaoka Middle School. He chases his father's legs and hides behind them when he sees someone unfamiliar, bunching up the fabric with his fingers. Gakuhou pats him on the head, an affectionate gesture he's not treated to in his own house, and speaks to him softer than the orders he's used to receiving. Gakushuu thinks he'll start to like this building.

It's when he's 10 that he learns about keeping up appearances. Acting and lying aren't new concepts to him, but he doesn't know what to think.

Gakushuu met Ikeda once more when he's 6, and this he does remember in vivid clarity. It's the framed photograph on his father's heavy mahogany desk; Gakushuu remembers his father's heartbroken silence that went on for several days and had gone into his office to cheer him up. He'd knocked over the frame and sent it shattering across the floor. His father had been mad at him, and Gakushuu had been too scared to tell him a little bit of glass had gone into his palm. He'd cut his other fingers trying to take it out and cried from the pain washing his wound under the bathroom sink.

Gakuhou had asked about the scar, once when he was 11, saying he doesn't remember Gakushuu getting it. Gakushuu had told him he had fallen down while running.

He wonders, sometimes, what would have happened if he had just come clean about the cut. He thinks it might have been a metaphor about how Gakuhou's inability to let go of the past would hurt the ones around him at present. Then he laughs at himself a little because that sounds pretentious. 

Gakushuu had a dream once. He was 11 and Ikeda was in this one, gently dabbing antiseptic on a wound on his palm that should have healed over years ago. "You should be more careful," he says, and when Gakushuu wakes up he finds that he'd dug his fingers so hard into his palm that he'd torn a bit of skin.

There's a basketball in Gakuhou's study that Gakushuu finds when he's 6 and asks to play with it. The look he gets is chilling, and he doesn't ask again. He has a dream later that night, and he's not allowed into the court, watching the boy in the photograph dribble the ball around and score an effortless three-pointer.

"That's my dad's ball," Gakushuu tells him, standing on tip toes on the opposite side of the wire fence.

The boy barely glances at him. "No, it's not." He lets the ball go, and it sails in a graceful arc and lands in the hoop.

Ikeda comes and goes in skips and flashes. He never stays for long, sometimes Gakushuu's watching him from afar and sometimes they have a conversation while he's asleep. Gakushuu thinks he's not real, at first, even though he can feel the heat off his arm when they're seated close. 

He sees the picture and thinks click into place, then, and he knows Ikeda is real - or a real person, at the very least. "I know who you are," he tells Ikeda, who's wearing the same calm smile he has in the photograph on his father's desk.

"I'm dead," Ikeda says. He doesn't look bothered by it.

"How did you die?" Gakushuu asks, fingers curling on his thigh. 

"I don't know," Ikeda says. His face is still impassioned, the blankness of the photograph, frozen in time. He opens his mouth when he speaks because people open their mouths when they speak, and he has hands and legs and a body because people have hands and legs and bodies. Ikeda doesn't know how he died because he's a figment of Gakushuu's imagination, and Gakushuu doesn't know how he died.

When he's treasure hunting in the attic at 10, he finds a picture of Ikeda and him and he adjusts Ikeda's height a little in his mind - a little bit taller than what he'd imagined at first. Ikeda played basketball, he thinks. He finds newspaper clippings and date markings.

"You jumped off a bridge," he tells Ikeda, even though he knows which means Ikeda already knows. They're sharing a mind, after all, Ikeda's in his space. He's him. Gakushuu just thought that he would want someone to tell him.

"I know," Ikeda says, predictably.

"What just drowning feel like?" Gakushuu asks, even though he knows he won't get an answer. He just wants to fill the silence between them, but that was the silence between him and himself.

"I don't know," Ikeda says. 

When Gakushuu is 13, he tells Ikeda what drowning feels like.

It feels like broken fingernails clawing against sharp rocks, burning in lungs as he fights to hold his breath and then burning in lungs as water rushes in. It feels like desperation. 

"Cool," Ikeda says. "I wonder what it felt like for me."

It felt like freezing cold, relief and numbness in his fingers and toes while gasping for air at the riverbank, rushing in ears and staring up against the sun, squinting at the silhouette of the bridge and thinking about how faraway it looks and how fast of a drop it had been. He wonders what it had felt like for Ikeda, who never made it above the surface.

Gakushuu had gone to a public elementary school, until he was 11. He'd learnt that a good shout could garner attention but yelling wasn't the way to go, people listened to him when he had soft words and they snapped to attention when they were sharp.

He had a dream once, Ikeda's looking at him wistfully. "You're very eloquent," he says, "like your father."

It stings, for some reason. "No I'm not," Gakushuu says.

"You are," Ikeda tells him. 

When he's 8, Gakushuu sees Ikeda on the outside of his head for the first time. He's at a ball game with his classmates when Ikeda wanders into view, and Gakushuu watches him walk over to a football.

"What are you staring at?" His classmate asks him. Ikeda's still there, watching Gakushuu with a little smile on his face. Gakushuu looks away.

When he's 14, Ikeda's on his heels, following him up the mountain trail to the 3-E classroom that used to be his old campus. They found a picture of him posing with the building in the background. "I haven't been here in forever!" Ikeda says, stretching, and Gakushuu doesn't reply because there's no point in an answer. He'd made a rule for himself when he'd first saw Ikeda, mostly so he does't seem insane to others, that he wouldn't talk to Ikeda out loud or in public. He breaks that rule three months later in the nurses' office, sitting cross legged on the bed and pressing a hand to the bandage on his cheek. His father had smacked him in the face, sending him crashing across the tables on the other end of the classroom. Ikeda sits next to him, distraught. "He never hit me," he says.

Gakushuu knows that. He knows that. He doesn't say a thing.

"He shouldn't have hit you," Ikeda continues, "he never hit me! I hate how this feels. Why did he hit you?"

"Well I'm not you!" Gakushuu snaps. The nurse draws the curtain back, startled, and Gakushuu gives her a shaky grin. She looks at him, half-wincing, and gives him a faux-reassuring smile, and this is why Gakushuu doesn't talk to Ikeda in public. His control is slipping.

He redresses his wound at home, looking at the mirror. He doesn't see Ikeda in the reflection, but he feels him curled around his shoulders and watching him. "He shouldn't have hit you," Ikeda says.

"He wouldn't have hit _you_ ," Gakushuu hisses. "I'm not you."

Gakushuu has a dream once, when he's 7. He's coloring in the lines of a coloring book when Ikeda kneels down next to him. "What's your favorite color?" Ikeda asks.

Gakushuu holds up a red crayon. 

"Oh, that other one is my favorite," Ikeda says, and he points to something on the ground between them. The memory of the dream is blurry and Gakushuu doesn't remember what color Ikeda was pointing at, but he supposes it doesn't matter because it's not red.

Gakushuu is 15 when he has both his hands on his cheeks, looking at the mirror. This time Ikeda is in the reflection watching him, but he's not behind Gakushuu. Gakushuu winces as he applies pressure on the healing cut from when his father smacked him in the face. His birthday was yesterday.

"He shouldn't have hit you," Ikeda says. Gakushuu scowls at him.

"Maybe you shouldn't have made him mad."

"He deserves to be mad," Gakushuu says. He applies more ointment on his cheek, luckily he doesn't think it would scar over.

"He's been through a lot," Ikeda says. He cocks his head.

"I don't care," Gakushuu says.

"I care," Ikeda says.

"Well, you're not me."

"Aren't I?" Ikeda says. Gakushuu's eyes snap up to stare at him. Ikeda's smiling coldly at him, eyes paper, and he looks exactly like the photograph on Gakuhou's table that Gakushuu sees whenever he enters the office. 

"You're not," Gakushuu says, because Ikeda is a figment of Gakushuu's imagination that he created from bits and pieces of what was left of a real person he found scattered around the empty hallways of his house. Ikeda wasn't real.

"Look at me," Ikeda says, and he steps in the way of Gakushuu's reflection. 

"Stop trying to psychoanalyze me," Gakushuu snaps, but he's talking to his reflection now, and his reflection is Ikeda, and he's not talking to Ikeda, he's talking to himself. 

When Gakushuu was 11 he started seeking out literature on the subject of why he hears and sees Ikeda in his head. He concluded that it was similar to why children had soft toys they called human names, why some people had imaginary friends - a personification of their needs, a desire for companionship and affirmation. He doesn't think he's so lonely or desperate that he'd created an imaginary friend, but Ikeda was still there. Ikeda had never mentioned it because Gakushuu never wanted to talk about it, and Ikeda was a reflection of Gakushuu's needs and perhaps at age 11, sitting alone in a class full of people, in hindsight Gakushuu thought that maybe he could use somebody in his life.

But Gakushuu didn't need Ikeda now. He had his friends or minions or whoever he could call on, he had social engagements and contracts and obligations. He didn't need Ikeda, and Ikeda wasn't a reflection of him or his needs. "Leave me alone," Gakushuu snaps, and he watches the expression on Ikeda's face morph into something almost resembling hurt, except that Ikeda's expression never changes from the boy in the picture on his father's desk.

"Gakushuu, I'm your reflection," Ikeda says, hand pressed to the mirror on the other side. "I've been with you since I was five!"

"Since I was five, not since you were," Gakushuu hisses, "you're not me! You're not me!"

And then Ikeda suddenly presses into the mirror, fingers digging into the plane, and for a moment Gakushuu imagines the color red and something else that fades in for a brief second that he can't recall. "Maybe if I was you," Ikeda snarls, and he's still wearing the same passive expression, "Sensei wouldn't have hit you," and Gakushuu smashes his fist through the glass.

Gakushuu has a dream once, when he's 15, cross-legged and facing the expanse of white nothing. Ikeda's sitting across him, fifteen stitches hidden by a bandage running up his left arm, and Gakushuu's own hand is clean and scar free.

"Why did you do that?" Ikeda says, voice pleading, and his face never, ever, changes. "It hurt me."

"It hurt me!" Gakushuu says, lifting his own hand. "I was the one bleeding! Not you!"

Ikeda holds his left hand up, a mirror of Gakushuu's right. "I'm the one with the stitches."

"That's the wrong hand!" Gakushuu explodes.

"It's not! It's my left hand! I'm your reflection!"

"You're not me!"

"I'm the opposite of you!"

And Gakushuu wakes up.

Gakushuu is 15 when he breaks his rule a second time, on his knees staring up at the Kunugigaoka Building that's been cordoned off by yellow tape, at the mill of security patrolling the place and at the glowing red shield surrounding the area. "What's happening, Ikeda?" He says, desperate, and Ikeda is a reflection of his needs and he needs answers but Ikeda only has the non-answers that Gakushuu has. 

"I don't know," Ikeda says, "go home. Go home."

"I don't want to go home," Gakushuu begs.

"You do," Ikeda says, and he's right. 

Gakushuu is 15 when he puts his fist through the mirror, and it shatters into tiny tiny pieces. The edges are speckled in red and thousands of fragments of Ikeda stare back at him, eyes wide, and Gakushuu feels tears in his eyes before he can stop it. He justifies it as the stinging pain.

"Why did you do that?" Ikeda and all his thousand fragments says, and his voice reverberates a thousand times in Gakushuu's head. "Why did you do that?" He asks over and over again, until Gakushuu has his hands tearing out at his hand and clapped over his ears and Ikeda's still calling out to him from amongst the shattered pieces of his reflection, and Gakushuu still doesn't know the answer.

When Gakushuu is 14 years old, Ikeda stands behind at his shoulder. When he's 15, Ikeda steps in front of him, and when he's 16, Gakushuu sees Ikeda in every reflection on every surface, mirroring his movements, eyes with that vacant paper stare. "Don't you get it?" Ikeda says, doing the exact opposite of everything Gakushuu is doing, smiling at him through the reinforced mirror with the same smile as the boy in the picture on his father's desk. 

"Don't you get it?" Ikeda says again, picking up a pen with his left hand as Gakushuu does on his right, spinning it anticlockwise, setting it back down. 

Gakushuu was the exact opposite of that boy who owns the space in the picture on his father's desk, the real Ikeda who his dad had once loved and loved and had his heart broken when he died, and Gakushuu was the complete opposite of everything Gakuhou had ever wanted.

Gakushuu knows that. He knows that. He created Ikeda in his head because he wanted, needed to be him, but he's gone too far now. He plays basketball and has blonde hair and Ikeda follows him around in the surfaces of shiny metal and glass windows and does the exact opposite of everything Gakushuu does, and Gakushuu knows that this is in his head because Ikeda's not real, he's not real.

"Who are you talking to?" Gakuhou says, alarmed. "I heard someone else in here."

Ikeda is staring at him, eyes wide. Gakushuu glances over, then at Gakuhou, who follows his gaze with trepidation.

"None of your business," Gakushuu says, because Ikeda's not real.

Ikeda's not real, he's dead. 

Gakushuu has a dream once, at 16. He's 9 and 10 and 11, then he's 12 and watching students flit in and out Kunugigaoka and giving him wide berth, then he's 13 and signing forms for paperwork and smiling at his schoolmates, then he's 15 with fifteen stitches running up alongside his arms. 

Then he's 15, stepping out of class 3-E's campus for the last time, 16 and picking himself up from the ground with scraped knees, 17 when he's looking down at rushing rapids from up above the bridge-

"-I'm not you! I'm not you!" Gakushuu hollers, "I'll never do that! I'll never do that!"

"No," Ikeda agrees, "you'll do the opposite."

When he's 16, Gakuhou sits down across him stiffly, hands folded on his lap. Gakushuu stares at him, pulling his legs up to his chest.

"You can tell me if there's anything wrong," Gakuhou says, sounding uncertain. 

There are plenty of things wrong, a lot Gakushuu wishes he could say, he wishes he could be who Gakuhou loves but he's the opposite of that. The ghost of Ikeda is haunting him, hovering over his shoulder this very instant; he's selfish, Gakushuu realizes, because bringing it up would mean reuniting them and he doesn't want that to happen. Ikeda was dead, dead, not real, dead, but he's looking at Gakushuu from behind Gakuhou's back, and then he's the boy on the picture on the desk but that boy is not real and the opposite of him and _dead_ -

"Leave me alone!" Gakushuu screams, "leave me alone! Get out of my head! You're not me, you're not the opposite of me, you're not!" 

And Gakuhou grabs onto him as he lashes out, slashing his palms against the mirror, and in the reflection he sees his father gripping tightly onto Ikeda and never letting go. "Don't you see?" Ikeda says, from where he has his face half-buried in Dad's shoulder and smiling at Gakushuu. "I'm the complete opposite of you." And then Gakushuu lifts his right hand, and Ikeda lifts his left.

Gakushuu has a dream, once, when he's 8. Ikeda's dabbing a washcloth to a scrape he has on his knee and he says, "I saw you playing football. I'm a basketball person myself."

"Is that basketball in Father's office yours?" Gakushuu says.

"Probably," Ikeda says. "I don't know. I was holding a basketball in that picture on his desk, right? It might be mine."

"But all basketballs look the same," Gakushuu says. 

"Are they the same, though?" Ikeda asks him.

"No," Gakushuu says.

"Hm," Ikeda says.

When he's 10 and dusting off cobwebs from cardboard boxes in the attic, Gakushuu realizes he doesn't know Ikeda's name. He reads it off the back of a photograph, Rikuto Ikeda, and from the lines of the newspaper clippings and scrawled in the margins of a torn page of a notebook. He hadn't had a name to put to the face of the boy in his dreams but when he reads Ikeda, it fits just right, and it's like Gakushuu has known it had been his name all along.

They've met once, before, when Gakushuu was 3. That is perhaps why he has a vague recall of the familiarity. Ikeda has Gakushuu on his lap, both of them looking at the camera. Gakushuu has a thumb in his mouth, and Ikeda has a peace-sign up. The photo is a little blurry around the edges, like the photographer was mid-laugh, but there's an exuberant vibe to it.

When Gakushuu is 15 he takes that picture out from where he had wedged it in a notebook and rips it up into a thousand tiny pieces, and watches it fall onto the floor. Ikeda's eyes don't look at him impassively from a thousand fragments but from only two slips of paper, he gets a paper cut on his left thumb and his right arm is aching because his fingers are shredded and there are fifteen stitches running up alongside his arm.

When he's 16, he draws the picture from memory in red crayon because that's his favorite color. He doesn't remember what it looks like.

"That's wrong," Ikeda says over his shoulder. "I don't look like that."

"I know, I know," Gakushuu says, "I know."

He looks at his reflection and Ikeda looks back. He raises his right arm and Ikeda raises his left.

"You're supposed to be shorter," Gakushuu says.

"Was I?" Ikeda says.

The picture is gone. Gaksuhuu's memory of it is a year old, but the picture is a decade old before that, and Gakushuu was 3. He has no frame of reference for when he was 3. How did he decide how tall Ikeda was going to be in the first place? 

"I don't know," Gakushuu says, and his voice sounds so faraway.

When Gakushuu is 10, he scratches himself on a stray nail in the attic for when he was knee deep sifting through memories for a story to read. He's down on his knees again now, age 17, or he will be in a few hours, flipping through old albums and records and booklets. He doesn't know what he's looking for.

The attic door opens. It's Gakuhou.

"Gakushuu?"

Gakushuu has a dream once. He's 17 in that one when he hasn't yet been, peering at the rushing rapids from up above a bridge. There's howling in his ears, nothing behind his back, and it's so dark and so cold. He's scared.

He doesn't want to jump. He doesn't want to jump.

His feet are at the edge of the bar, toes poking out past the metal beam he's balanced on, one arm gripping onto the railing behind him and another curled on the pole adjacent. Wind is whipping in the face. He's so scared.

Drowning is like fire in his chest, burning in his lungs, biting on his limbs, Gakushuu doesn't want to drown, Ikeda can't make him drown, he's not Ikeda, he's not going to drown, he's going to do the opposite, the opposite-

"How tall was he?" Gakushuu says, "Ikeda. How tall was he?"

Gakuhou stiffens beside him, from where he has joined Gakushuu on the attic floor. 

"A little bit shorter than you," Gakuhou says, and taps the space at Gakushuu's forehead. "Here."

"I don't remember it," Gakushuu says. "I don't remember it."

"You met him when you were three."

"I've met him so many more times than that. You look at me like I'm going insane," Gakushuu sobs, as Gakuhou's hand hovers an unsteady inch over his shoulder. "I'm not. I've seen him so many times. I'm not."

Gakushuu has a dream, once. He's 15 and he has a bandage on his right arm, and in the dream Ikeda looks to be a little taller than him

_no, that's wrong_

and he has a bandage mirroring Gakushuu on his left arm. He says it hurts

 _that's not tru_ e

and he asks Gakushuu why he did it. "Can't you see?" Ikeda says. "I'm your reflection. Why do you want to get rid of me, Gakushuu? I'm you!"

"You're nothing like me!" Gakushuu yells. "You're the complete opposite of me!"

"We're two sides of the same coin!" Ikeda says, throwing his hands out, smiling. "I'm you! I'm your mirror!"

"I don't know who you are!" Gakushuu screams. "You're not the real Ikeda! The real Ikeda's dead! You're not real!"

In a second Ikeda's in front of Gakushuu, pressing both his hands to Gakushuu's cheek, and Gakushuu feels a long healed wound reopen and swell and drip with blood through Ikeda's fingers, and it's warmth flowing down his face.

"Doesn't this feel real, Gakushuu?" Ikeda says.

Gakushuu wakes up crying.

He's 14 and running up the hill to the 3-E classroom of Kunugigaoka Middle School, Ikeda hot on his heels, like it's a game between them. Gakushuu knows that he wouldn't lose Ikeda because he made Ikeda and Ikeda was in his head. He slows to a walk when they're within earshot of the classroom and Ikeda says, "I haven't been here in forever!"

He's 9 and Ikeda's the friend he never had, amongst the whispers of children that avoid him because he wraps his knuckles and punches hard and leave bruises the size of tennis balls on people's faces. 

He's 10 and he learns Ikeda's name, age, and how he fits into the puzzle pieces of Gakushuu's life like he'd always belonged. His reality is solidified, but he's still not real, Gakushuu tries to remind himself, he'a just the ghost of a boy in the picture on his father's desk.

Then he's 13 and Ikeda is kneeling in front of him, sobbing in the same expression that the boy wears, asking Gakushuu why he became the reason he killed himself.

_"I don't know! I don't know! Leave me alone!"_

"We're opposites," Ikeda tells him in a dream once, sitting on Gakushuu's chest and digging his fingers into his shoulder as Gakushuu cries and cries and cries, and there's water rushing all around them and filling the endless expanse of nothing until they're standing on the edge of a metal beam, peering at the rushing rapids from up above a bridge. 

"You became the reason I killed myself," Ikeda says. "See that? You're the reason I jumped."

Gakushuu met Ikeda once when he was 3, but he doesn't remember it. There's a photograph of Gakushuu on Ikeda's lap somewhere in the archives of family photographs, and Gakushuu ripped it into tiny little pieces. He wishes he had it back, now, because Ikeda was making a funny face in that one, and all Gakushuu sees is the blank stare and impassive smile of the boy in the picture on his father's desk-

There's a basketball in Gakuhou's study that Gakushuu finds when he's 6 and asks to play with it. He has a dream later that night about a nameless boy he puts a name to when he's 10. His name is Ikeda, and in this dream there's a fence between them, and Ikeda is playing. It's funny, because in most other dreams Ikeda is the one who watches as Gakushuu does things.

Gakushuu curls his fingers in the gaps of the wire fence and watches the ball bounce, bounce, bounce. 

"I was never very good at basketball," Ikeda tells him, "but I loved to play it."

"I want to play it too," Gakushuu says.

"Maybe when you're older," Ikeda says, "you'll be better than me." 

Gakushuu is 5 when his father comes home with his heart broken, 10 when he learns the name of why, and 15 when he realized he's become the opposite of everything Gakuhou has ever wanted. He raises his right hand, and his reflection raises his left. Ikeda smiles at him and says, "maybe if I was you, Dad wouldn't have hit you."

"Don't call him dad," Gakushuu chokes out.

"Well," Ikeda says, "he's your sensei, isn't he? And you're my opposite, which means..."

"He's your sensei!" Gakushuu screams, hoarse. "You call him sensei! You, not me!"

"What do you call him then?" Ikeda asks, and when Gakushuu doesn't reply, he tilts his head and says, "what does he call you, then, Asano? Are you his son, or his student?" 

On the ride to the hospital, Ikeda looks at him in the car mirror, left hand dripping with blood.

_"I'm your mirror, remember? Everything you do, I do, but opposite."_

Gakushuu is 13 when he slips over the edge of the pond. It's an accident and he's scared, and afterwards he thinks of Ikeda and tells him what drowning was like. 

"I wonder what it was like for me," Ikeda says. "You made it out. I wonder what it's like for someone who didn't."

"Bad, probably," Gakushuu tells him.

Ikeda laughs at that. "You wouldn't have tell me what it's like. You made me so I am you, after all, and I'll be there _when_ you find out."

_"You are the reason I jump, Gakushuu. What if I'm the reason you do?"_

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I brought this story up somewhere in the comments section in my fic Dream (if you haven't read it yet but you've enjoyed this, you might like that one!) saying I have something similar in the works and well, here it is. 
> 
> I'm sorry. Do let me know what you think!
> 
> (A little update: if you feel confused as to what went down in the fic, I left a kinda-long comment under our anon commenter "Meh" breaking this down a bit. Don't be afraid to ask me about anything, I don't bite I promise)


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